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It’s not every day you get to meet a literary titan like Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, even if you’re bestselling Vancouver writer Sebastien de Castell. But that’s exactly what happened when de Castell, who describes his fantasy books as “Game of Thrones meets The Three Musketeers,” attended the recent Hugo Awards in Kansas City. He saw […]

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Toronto never will be mentioned in the same breath as Chicago or New Orleans when it comes to naming historically important cities for blues. Yet in Canada, Toronto is the home for blues and recently has seen the release of records in which blues is the foundation as well as a concept. Toronto has the […]

There have always been rookie and free-agent camps in professional football — like the one the Saskatchewan Roughriders staged in Bradenton, Fla. in April of last year. Mostly the camps yield a stack of travel bills and a chance for candidates to get lost in the crowd.

The first Granville Bridge was built across False Creek in 1889, when Vancouver was only three years old. But as the city boomed, the bridge proved woefully inadequate. So the city decided to build a bigger one, which opened on Sept. 6, 1909.

Lisa Fischer speaks with friends, family and inquisitive journalists over the phone before a tour, but once out on the road she keeps her spoken words to a minimum. The vow of silence is one of several rules that Fischer, a vocalist with stratospheric range and immense power, puts into practice to save her voice for the demands of performing.

KAMLOOPS – “Everything is Possible” is the motto of Missouri Western State University. Indeed, anything is still possible for two former roommates with the Griffons who have been reunited in the training camp of the B.C. Lions.

The lionization of Floyd Mayweather can make for a strange and tawdry spectacle. He is venerated by his disciples as a man of mystique, even when he plays up to his vulgarian nature by stepping out of his Bugatti festooned in more gold than Mr T, or by throwing $100 bills at the camera while encircled by a phalanx of acolytes that would embarrass the president.

The mystique of old Vienna retains surprising potency. It underlies the current popularity of André Rieu, and the lasting appeal of that operetta of operettas, Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, which epitomizes the power of both ersatz nostalgia and genuine charm. Vancouver Opera opened a four-performance run at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Saturday evening.

1-800-GOT-THREE: Twenty-four individuals will have completed franchise agreements with 43-year-old Brian Scudamore by month’s end. But they won’t be with the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? organization he founded here in 1989. That’s because they’re already top performers with that 173-franchisee outfit, which expects to take in $131 million this year. Given their successes in major markets New York, Boston, San Francisco, Toronto, etc., Scudamore and 1-800-GOT-JUNK? COO Erik Church invited them to sign on again with the recently created You Move Me service and give it what is claimed to be the largest franchise launch ever. The new endeavour’s legal title isn’t capitalized like those of the original rubbish-removal firm or the WOW 1 DAY! whole-home-painting service Scudamore debuted in 2011 after acquiring 88 per cent of a firm Jim Bodden founded here. But he believes the home-moving operation has the potential to generate the most franchises while linking profitably with the others. A Kansas City resident already holds franchises for all three, said Scudamore, thus “allowing someone to move, have their home painted and their junk taken away all at one time.”

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